The present invention relates generally to video game apparatus and more particularly to a video amusement game utilizing a consumer video disk as a read only memory for storage of compressed digitized video data and non-video digital data.
It has become increasingly advantageous to employ digital techniques to process video image signals in digital form. It is particularly true in the video game art where access to and manipulation of large amounts of video information has become more and more essential. Unfortunately, the digitized video signals typically require eight bits of digital data for each of the hundreds of thousands of separate picture elements (pixels) in each video frame. Thus, a bit rate in excess of 240 megabits per second can result from digitizing video image signals. Storage of video data in view of the resulting large amount of data and the wide bandwidth required causes extremely expensive storage systems to be necessary.
One highly efficient and cost effective analog storage device known in the art is the consumer video disk. However, U.S. consumer video disk recorders have a standard analog television channel bandwidth limit of approximately 4.2 Mhz (i.e. bandwidth limit determined by NTSC standards) and therefore, have not been suitable as a memory device for digitized video signals. Therefore, the need exists for an effective means to record and replay digitized video signals on a video disk to permit the use of a video disk as a memory device in video games.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved video game employing a video disk as random access memory utilized as a read only memory to store digitized video signals.
As yet another object of the invention is to provide a cost effective means for storage of large amounts of digital video data for a video game.
Briefly, in accordance with one aspect of the invention there is provided a video amusement game comprising a video display for the display of video images, a video disk for data storage, and input controls for providing user signals responsive to a player. Video disk retrieval apparatus is provided for retrieval of stored, compressed, digitized video signals representative of at least portions of the video images from the video disk. In addition, circuitry is provided for reconstruction, on the video display, of video images responsive to the user signals, and utilizing the compressed digitized video signals retrieval from the video disk.